Hugo Williams

I was trying to remember who shouted out ‘Wakey Wakey!’ Was it Arthur Askey? I couldn’t understand how Kay Kendall and Denholm Elliot slipped through my fingers. Even my favourite biscuits melted on the tip of my tongue. A prayer went missing, as if I wouldn’t be needing it again.

A head full of memorabilia and I couldn’t remember...

Are we dead, do you think? I thought we were when I visited your art school annexe and saw your things all over the floor. Someone had nailed a dress to a board and thrown a pot of paint at it. We left the flowers on your desk and went for a walk near the reservoir.

The different sets of broken promises lay in wait for us on the muddy path. What was I really doing last...

Now that the sun has made it over the tops of the opposite houses, flaring through the wrecks of wallflowers and marguerites, the seeds from giant purple flowers spiral up over the graves of the chrysanthemums, one-winged sycamore planes revolve on their axes down through the air.

A slight breeze knocks the bell heather. Sun wobbles in the bird mirror. The green shed is humming. The...

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Are you still Chinese yellow? Are your blinds still drawn against prying eyes on the tops of buses? How well I remember you, perched beside a traffic-light on the corner of Ladbroke Grove, our tree-house lookout post, shuddering and shaking all night to the jamming of gears, the headlights of cars kerb-crawling the platform where we slept. You held us suspended halfway between heaven and...